


at sixes and sevens with a devil of a bet

by sunshowerst



Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [5]
Category: Ocean's Eleven Trilogy (Movies)
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Bone-deep Love, Character Study, Feelings Realization, Friends To We'd Be Lovers If I Deserved You, Introspection, Light Angst, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-10
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:53:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29341635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshowerst/pseuds/sunshowerst
Summary: The spring before their last con, Danny calls Rusty in for a two-man job in Chicago.or, saul's advice on never betting on something he can't afford to see the silk-clad back of ends up being a two-way street
Relationships: Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan
Series: danny and rusty and no one else on earth [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2128335
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	at sixes and sevens with a devil of a bet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cleardishwashers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cleardishwashers/gifts).



> there's a part of it that's in rusty's pov, starts under -// and ends with //- ; the rest is danny's point of view, hopefully its not confusing. enjoy!

"This," Danny says, his words that turned to mist in cold air dragged out to let Rusty swallow his bite, "is exactly like-" 

"Yeah. Second or seventh time?" 

"A bit of both." 

It really was nothing like Madrid, aside from the novelty, and that no one else was on the job, because like in Madrid those two times, they didn’t need anyone else for most of the kind of con that’s done for the thrill of it and nothing else. Unlike this, Madrid was when they were young and their long term goals unattainable, their debts unpaid. Madrid was when Danny had someone to cheat on, and did, and never brought it up again, so neither did Rusty, for both of their sakes, except for joking about Madrid, layered, like this. But now, here, was after Rusty attained his, and so did Danny. Three different times.

Neither were satisfied with the hotel or the married life. Else they wouldn’t be back here, doing recon for a job they could pull off blind and dying. But Linus asked them nicely, and then promptly sprained his ankle, so they were back down to two men and a good enough excuse to see it through - for Linus’ sakes. He was a good kid. 

Unlike here, Madrid is hot and humid and not freezing cold. Unlike here, Danny was ready to gamble on Rusty because he thought his biggest dream was exactly what he came running to Rusty from, one more time now.

And it’s not like Danny is bothered by it, it’s that he knows Rusty really is. Bothered by the cold, which he looked like he wanted to kill him for. Linus already got his punishment for making them work in Chicago of all places - he slipped on an ice-ridden staircase. Apparently. Danny would have looked into the validity of that recount if he weren’t so invested in staying a while, with an excuse for the reason.

(Rusty probably did look into it, and whatever he found out didn’t get him to leave, despite the cold, and call it off as well. And, well, if it were enough for Rusty.)

"You know I don’t--"

"Jackets were invented time ago."

Rusty doesn’t bother hiding his annoyance. He huffs and brushes the crumbs off of his lapels with shaky fingers. He was putting up an act - it wasn’t that cold in the park they cut through to get to their car. Danny still felt kind of bad for calling him in for this job out of everything, even if Rusty could have declined.

(A lie. But contrary to the obvious takeaway, Danny still had a bit of a conscience to placate, when it came to certain people and a stray principle, here and there. Rusty fell under both.) 

"They’re against my religion."

"You subscribe to a religion?"

"I’m this side of thirty, Danny. It would be rude not to."

He laughs despite the premonition in that sentence and pulls over at the next truck stop along the way, a dive bar where their pristine suits and gilded glasses screamed 'fake and tacky', because you had to be insane to ruin a white tailored Armani coat with precambrian age grease and hay smoke these people have been burning in here like incense since high noon. No ventilation whatsoever, the feeling reminded Danny of the time he did shrooms on a plane bathroom and felt like his lungs were taking in only nitrogen. But it was warm in here and they had cherry pie on the menu and Rusty had to be hungry still. 

The waitress puts some sultry into the sway of her hips and they bet silently with their respective, barely there lip twitches and eyebrow raises as to who she decided was worthy of being her mark.

Danny bet on Rusty, and somehow knew he would lose.

"Well, what can I do you for, gentlemen?" she asks, sweet and her gaze heavier than the smoke, as she not-so-subtly leans into Danny’s side. So Rusty did win himself a free meal here. And he coughed so to say that he got her joke, and to signal Danny that he has the right to brag on knowing how to read people for the next seven months. Danny, overall, missed feeling endeared over familiarity in annoyance.

-//

It’s not that Rusty can’t see where she’s coming from, which is a surprising thought to have, but not unexpected. Like a well then, more than a huh. Danny looks better than ever, shrouded in gray and a new ease that comes with divorcing the same person a fifth time. Or eighteenth. Rusty’s never counting.

Danny rolls his eyes after ordering for the both of them and flashing the already enamored server a Vegas style smile; as if he heard his thoughts. As if he didn’t. _Thrice, Rusty. Thrice._

“After first, it’s the same thing,” he persists. Danny concedes - by smiling, and it’s a first. Both the smile, and the conceding. Rusty knows why the both of them are here. What he doesn’t know is why they aren’t leaving, yet.

//

In Madrid, way back when, Danny bites his neck, enough to break skin nearly, when he snaps his hips forward to drive himself further inside. And it’s everything, those few seconds, all that he’d asked for of heists and cons but more potent and closer than they’d ever been when trailing fingers over ink splotched blueprints and thinking of this, at the same time, without letting themselves realize it. Like through a fog dense enough to be physically obstructive, he hears himself gasp without trying for it, and wonders how long he'd been wanting this instead of that, or if that was ever without hints towards this at all. 

“You need to stop,” Danny says, quiet, low, strained with exertion and enough lust to get them both through the fallout after this. To think there’d be an after this, at all. Danny answers his valid concern by swapping sweat with spit on the skin of his throat and grazing it right above his pulse point with the same teeth he lied his way out of death through, and it’s enough for then, for now. “Stop thinking, Rus.”

And Rusty does.

//

“You like colors."

“Not on my neck.” He’s rubbing at the very purple splotches above his collar so the clots dissolve faster.

They do, but Linus still looks at him kind of funny, and the kid’s too young then to know being open about everything that’s on your mind gets you near and short and small, and Rusty didn’t care for stopping him from learning that on his own time.

(These days, he thinks that maybe he should’ve picked up a thing or two from Linus, in turn. On what to do when off the job, cause Rusty was beginning to regret not being off of it for longer.)

//

“My back hurts.”

Danny responds when he’s already managed to close the door on his own and put on an annoyed face, to hide the startled one at seeing Danny in just a shirt and boxer briefs and a sharp glint on his left ring finger.

“From carrying the team?”

“From carrying your booze. This,” he says, lifting the bags that clinked glassy and familiar with every twitch of his arms, “means you’re an alcoholic.” 

He’s not mad at the alcohol, so much so as at the fact that he can’t get drunk because of the job, and Danny can. And the fact that Danny tends to forget he’s married, like he did last night, when he’s just drunk enough to pretend it’s the drinking that made him forget.

“Ripe for a sobriety chip?” 

Rusty’s face crinkles up. It sounds like a joke Tess would make. Not that he knows her at all; he just knows Danny. Maybe that's why he lets him get away with it. 

“Worst kind of chips.”

“Right after those--” 

“Oh. Yeah. Those ones are unbeatable.”

(Reuben’s first casino run had a series of five hundred dollar chips with coconuts printed on them instead of zeroes _for good luck_ , as he was convinced they bring good fortune by a mystic he doesn’t visit anymore. They both tried to talk him out of it, together and on separate occasions, to be fair to them, and mostly to be allowed to make fun of him later. The chips got a pretty scalding review and made a critic’s headline as _the gaudiest thing in the shrine to bad taste that turned enough money to buy the owner some taste, if he would care for such a thing at all_. It was hilarious even to Reuben, after a while. Rusty’s pretty sure he still has one or two in one of his ready-to-go character wallets, for good luck.)

//

The night is never brought up, after the conversation about hickeys and the one sympathetic look Danny shoots Rusty when he winces at the pain in his lower back. Rusty would be fine with it, if he didn't realize before Danny did - like always, with these things - that this could be something. 

They went so well together that Rusty didn't mind how nothing else in his life did. Like, hotel ownership and larceny. Childhood of poverty and a garage just for Porches until those got boring, too. Like a lilac shirt and a blue suit. Like chips ahoy dipped in club soda with lime. 

Like a marriage and a night outside its limits, back in Madrid, on the seventh time. 

So Danny didn't care either. He was never the one to get hung up on the details, anyways. 

And exactly because truths are the simplest thing to say, since Danny was the idea guy, the convolute everything to the point of no one but you seeing the exit guy, he unsurprisingly reserved from telling himself the truth and letting them both have it. Better yet, Rusty knew Danny's thoughts better than Danny did and that's how he knew that Danny thought he was the first one to figure this out. 

That Danny would play this off as surface level, as be all end all contained under fingernails after scratching that surface. As if it wasn't gonna continue meaning everything to the both of them if they just pretend the ring meant Danny ever made a real choice. As if Rusty leaving for Europe the moment the job was finished, for three years, meant anything but a pause in the conversation not because they don't have anything to say to the other, but because they know what the other knew already. 

And because Rusty did know him well, Danny never tells Rusty about his revelations, and Rusty never points them out to him, and he's in Barcelona before he can remember Linus' philosophy and how late it was for him to try and follow it, with Danny at least. 

He finds Isabel and acts by it, and it works, for then. For now. 

//-

The only thing he could say that Rusty genuinely cared for maintaining in his hotel was good water pressure and quality shampoos.

In Chicago, Danny felt the absence of both of those. 

(And almost the third one, too.)

"Did you sell your hotel?"

"Lended."

"To Reuben?"

"To Reuben."

"At thirty--"

"Percent, yeah."

He throws his clothes aside and a dismaying look at the metal rack that held the mint shampoo he was to use and get used to.

"And he got rid of--"

"That he did."

 _Damn._ It was probably the only hotel in all of North America that had good shampoo, Danny would bet his savings on that. Probably also why the both of them shouldn’t be trusted with big money and stable investments.

"Remind me to buy--"

"Other cabinet, second shelf."

He tries not to think too much about it, about how Tess had three years to learn him like this, and Rusty had those same three years to forget, and neither happened to. He tries not to think about it, but knows the smell of argan oil and black orchid will linger in his hair to remind him of it for as long as they're here. 

"You’re the smartest man on earth."

"And beyond."

That last sentence was said over a bite of food that was - and Danny could bet on that too - probably Thai takeaway, and definitely bought with Danny's card. 

-

By the time he showers and makes sure one last time that their marks have all arrived to the banquet, and are staying for the gala after, Rusty had gotten into his seventieth skin and covered that skin with a suit that hugged him like it saw him for the first time since his leaving for war, and Danny remembered why he used to get alcohol, for cons where Rusty was the bait.

He looked, smelled, stood and moved rich, and if he were a building Danny would've considered robbing it and risk getting caught doing it, which he only did one other time in his life. 

And he knows it, because of course you had to know, when you looked like that, that you look like that. 

He knows it and he checks himself out in the reflection on Danny's sunglasses, and smirks when Danny raises his eyebrows about it.

Smug, pedantic bastard that he is, didn't have to try this hard over one jewelry set, even if just the necklace alone went for a million. 

He can't explain how he lived more in the two weeks they've been reunited than the three years they'd been apart. He can't explain why it terrifies him, either. 

-

The gala was in a mountain of a building that would put the Vatican's cathedral to shame with its high ceilings, its tall portraits and walls in gold and marble that should charge twenty dollars per glance. 

And Rusty could do old money, easy. Could fit well with fur coats and fitted undershirts and watches that bling secretive, hiding; insincere smiles and worthless talks with worthful people. Heavy perfume smell and well groomed nails and hands softer than the silk of his metallic gray shirt, with the blue glow when they're in places like this, like low hanging chandeliers heavier than a mid-sized elephant and gold light off walls. Like a ballroom but less opulent, more rich. Oil and gold mines and slave labor and stock. 

Rusty almost fooled him, with the easy smiles of his own and as sincere as their profession had them be, and chiseled face, and the grace to his movements he never bothers with around Danny. 

Rusty almost fools him with his light steps and easy leaning on walls they'd never deserve a place between, if these people knew like Danny knew, what dinky shack by seaside Rusty came to hail from, what kind of a family line he'd inherited without his own fault for it. If they saw him in the same shirt for two weeks at school, if they saw him eat a whole kebab with garlic sauce and tomatoes and more than the weekly salt recommendation in three bites, after he got the money to buy every shirt in every store in New Jersey at the time they met. 

He'd almost, nearly fool Danny, if Danny didn't know him like you only get to know what you want to keep and never let go. Like you know what you try to find in everything else but fail. Like you know what you don't want to lose, what you're scared to have. Like you love who you never loved anyone else because of. And Danny tried. Three times. 

Rusty shrugs his way and leans into the hand that's on his back, a widow - _the_ widow, that they were after, with a dead fox on her arms and a foxy smile on a bold red lip but not bold enough to be a scandal, an offer. She leans in like the waitress leaned, and Danny wonders if his middle school lessons on Newton talked about special gravity like this one looked to be. 

She laughs at everything he says, accepts when he asks of her to cut a rug with him over a stock broker's boring offer of probably waltz. She blushes when he smiles down at her, and she's a decade older than him and she thinks she has him in an iron grip by his lapels, when he's the one that put glue on them. 

Danny missed these two man jobs, when Rusty was always the bait because Danny was the one with the big idea and in it, Rusty was always this. The one that was to seduce, 'cause to Danny's mind that was the natural option - he never, never noticed why that's what made his hand so obvious. So telling. 

Until the Banks job, until Saul's knowing look, and Danny hated finding out about himself from other people that weren't Rusty. 

("She's a bit of a- well. Cougar."

"Got it. Rusty, you're on-" 

Linus objects there. Danny lets him off with whatever he proposed, cause they all were distracted and laughing at the kid and not yet with the kid. Cause Saul was looking at him as they laughed, like he was looked at by Jessica from his parole hearing. Guilty but getting away with it. 

Saul catches him by his arm later, leaves him wondering for a few moments. Till his brain catches up like he didn't let it before then. 

Ah. Naturally. 

"You think this through, Danny."

"I always do."

"You _never_ do. He does."

And Danny's left to wonder, with a glass of rum on ice that melted by the time he took a sip, why he never put one and one together. Naturally, Rusty was to be the seducer. Naturally, cause Danny couldn't see how anyone could possibly resist him even when he doesn't try that hard. Naturally, cause Danny was one of those that couldn't.) 

-

(Rusty barely ever asked him questions he wanted the answer to. But this time, there was a new tattoo, as if his hands weren't distracting enough already. 

And he was staring, clearly. Apparently. 

"You hate it?" 

Danny shakes his head and looks away, cause he doesn't trust his voice to be level. Cause he knows Rusty would know that it isn't. 

Rusty shrugs, and keeps his left arm out of sight for the rest of that job.)

-

His heart was on a swing carousel, the whole time, like always- after twelve-fourteen, Rusty excused himself from the conversation circle and left, and Danny saw her eyes glued to his back, her lips a thin line that said she didn't care for what the baron of this and that to her left had to say. 

He could see where she was coming from. He was the one that put Rusty in that role, in the first place. In every place. 

_You're welcome,_ he thinks to himself, bitter on his tongue from the lime in his drink and not at all from misplaced jealousy, as he leaves as well, an hour later, and that much more relaxed cause the finale was the easiest part of tomorrow he'll have to be sober for. 

-

The sun set fire with its light in the room they shared out of habit more than the need, unlike their first year in the business, painting walls in reds and oranges and making Rusty's well-tanned skin glow gold and glamorous, pedestal worthy and more expensive than any heist - even the last night's one, successful because of course it was - set them forward. 

Even back in Jersey Danny knew that he was made for silk shirts and silk sheets and silk tongues that slid soft across his smooth skin and left no marks when they were done.

Unlike him, in Madrid. Unlike that one that still remained a thin white strip on the underside of his left wrist, barely noticeable but there, where Rusty's dad cut it open for not getting away with getting in trouble at school, before his dad ended up the one getting away.

(Danny carried his things for him for a week and helped him put the ace bandage on after he'd shower or dirty up the old one. Danny carried a deep seated hatred for his deadbeat cunt of a father as well, and promised himself to make his life miserable the moment Rusty greenlights it - he never did.)

Danny thinks he can hope to afford him, he will be able to, one day, and Rusty stays in his position, shirtless and basking in the farewell rays not unlike a housecat or a homesick angel waving heaven goodbye at the funeral of today. 

He sticks out when he's not making an effort to blend in or stick out in a wrong way, with a wrong color scheme and loud suits and eating like he did when he had to scarf down food on the go if he wanted to keep from starving that day. 

Like this, in hotel rooms and around people like Danny and Reuben and Saul, he was like genuine Armani in a dive bar. Without accents and ridiculous suits and the greasy food, he'd look too close to something that deserved an altar to pull off any heist without pulling a cult following after it, too. Danny didn't believe in a god that cared about everyone. but he clearly cared about this one person, measured his DNA twice before cutting it. 

"What're you lookin' at," Rusty asks without turning around, and Danny meets his gaze in the floor-to-ceiling window that a whole city was behind. The curve of his lips says that he'll catch him in a lie before he even says it. 

"Deciding if I like it."

Rusty runs his tattooed hand over the buzzcut he got for laying low's purposes, and frowns. 

"Well? Do you?" 

He stares openly this time, gauges what it'd feel like under his fingers, on his own skin if they; if he… if. 

"Maybe I just miss the old one." 

Rusty's eyes squint, and then widen.

In two hours they were due to leave this hotel and get as far away from here as possible, he'd thought up the twins to get them a getaway car for the first half of their trip. In twenty minutes, Rusty will get up to get dressed for it.

Danny weighs his options. 

Feels his whole being shake like willows before a storm, like the ground did in the Bellagio, because of them and Basher; this time, because of Rusty. 

Who he'll be able to afford - one day. A day that wasn't just any Wednesday in May. He got locked up for four years for someone he didn't love; he took advantage of the one he did, and debts were one thing that he promised himself never to fall into again, second only to remarrying Tess. 

Before he can gather his wits, Rusty speaks, like he never does - distant. Closed off, even for Danny. And explains, like he never does. Never to Danny. 

"You do know that Linus didn't-- yeah. You do."

It's how he said it that makes Danny get up and off of the bed as if it's suddenly made out of poison ivy and barbed wire, and smoothe the creases in his suit out to buy (steal) himself time to think of an escape. From a choice, 'cause he never knew how to make one that was good for him, that mattered, in these things. 

Rusty's face doesn't change at all, not even by a twitch and Danny would notice, and that was the worst part - that Rusty expected a rejection, explicitly, even though Danny wasn't torn anymore. Even though Danny was as sure as he'd ever been of anything, what he wanted. 

But he knows - Danny hopes he knows that it is exactly that what makes this impossible. For a while. For now. And he doesn't know how to connect the dots without Rusty, because Saul was right and Danny's residual principles flared up and Rusty was right there: quiet, and out of place because this is earth, and closed off. 

Danny's heart dropped then like a bad elevator from that one time in Norway, his words almost robotic, tripping each other up on their fall from his leaded tongue, because this was a con with imaginary curtains, and he wanted more than anything to pull it off. 

"We'll meet with the Malloys tonight, for the car. We split a hundred miles in, just for a few months till this blows over."

It's as good of an apology as he can muster, and his soul is ash he'll cough up when he drops Rusty off and watches his back as he leaves, and sees the widow looking back at him from the rearview mirror when he checks it for oncoming cars. 

Rusty's looking through the glass this time. At far away, at some mountains Danny can't see from Chicago. He nods when the sky starts looking more purple than pink, and pulls a t-shirt over his head like a ballet move soaked in blood, and sheer as tulle is with its intention. He'd swear later he heard Rusty sigh, light as a thief's touch, heavy as a thurible's smoke in the lungs of a sinner. 

-

-

Danny leaves ahead of time, before he can ruin it. 

-

-

And ignores devotedly, the slight air of bone-deep weariness Rusty hauled about him, that night in their black and cold getaway Cadillac; as he kept silently flipping an old, familiarly hideous-looking casino chip between his fingers.

**Author's Note:**

> comments & kudos appreciated! huge shoutout to user cleardishwashers again, your comments are most of the motivation i get for writing these! thank you all again!


End file.
